Current Exhibitions in Chelsea

David Zwirner presents Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art, a thematic exhibition spanning two floors of the gallery’s West 20th Street location in New York.

“Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this exhibition takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries. Drawn from international museum and private collections, the exhibition at David Zwirner includes more than 130 works from the twelfth century to the present day.”

“Sublimating the natural world in works that both defy and embrace the basic functions of art, Falls’ works record specific moments in time as well as the infinite human impulse to commune with nature. For the series of paintings on view, Falls brings large sheets of canvas into the deepest corners of America’s national parks, covering them with dry pigments and arranging bracken and found flora to create intricate patterns. These arrangements are then left exposed to the elements, where dewdrops, mist, rain, sun and atmosphere activate the pigments. This process, similar to a photogram, records not only the formal qualities of the plant life, but also a semblance of the psychological and climatic substrata that constitute a tenuous definition of ‘place.’ These works, large in a New York gallery but mere blips in the overwhelming space of nature, point to the inescapable omnipresence of the natural world in our lives outside society – the circadian rhythms and innate formal reflexes that determine what might be interpreted as beautiful, optimistic, pleasing, virtuous, ominous, or frightening. That nature itself has been perhaps the most pervasive concern of art since the beginning of mark-making should be no surprise.”

“The Deserted City’ is curated by Edoardo Gnemmi, Director Fondazione Fausto Melotti, and sheds new light on Melotti’s marriage of sculptural mastery and poetic sensibility through a unique exhibition design that draws inspiration from the metaphysical landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings and Alberto Burri’s magnum opus, ‘Grande Cretto.’ Creating an environment that hovers between the earthly and the otherworldly, ‘The Deserted City’ situates Melotti’s work within the context of his fellow Italian artistic titans and highlights their shared belief that art can facilitate a return to life.”